Stellan Skarsgård (Magnet Releasing)

Freshly plowed snowbanks stained blood red provide instant art direction for a darkly comic thriller from Norway.

Stellan Skarsgård stars as Nils Dickman (a name more than one character finds amusing), who runs a snow removal business so well that he wins a Citizen of the Year award. As he gets ready for a celebratory banquet, he cuts himself shaving, a drop of red breaking the wake of shaving cream he’s plowed away from his skin. It’s a neat visual metaphor for what happens to the film’s winter landscape.

While Nils prepares for his moment, his son Ingvar is in trouble. Thugs have kidnapped Ingvar and injected him with drugs, forcing an overdose. After identifying his son’s body, he insists that Ingvar was no addict, but the Norwegian police, whose incompetence is a running gag throughout the movie, don’t believe him.

When his son’s friend turns up to explain that they ran afoul of vicious dealers, Nils takes his revenge, starting with the thugs who kidnapped and drugged his son and working his way up the gangland food chain. Along the way Nils inadvertently sets off a turf war between a Norwegian crime lord called The Count (Pål Sverre Hagen) and a Serbian boss known as Papa (Bruno Ganz).

This is essentially a one-joke movie: the mad snowplow driver takes revenge again and again, slowly but surely, frequently using his plow as a weapon. But it’s a good joke told with style. Cinematographer Philip Øgaard creates a cool, sinister atmosphere from nighttime drives through a winter wonderland, so much so that I was riveted by its visuals even though I was watching it on my iPhone. But this is a movie meant for the big screen.

The movie’s English title is a bit of a misnomer. Starting with Ingvar’s demise, every death in the film is followed by a black title card with the name of the deceased and a cross—or the religious symbol appropriate to the recently departed. In Order of Disappearance was originally released in Norway in 2014, and you wonder why it took so long for a movie this entertaining to turn up stateside—and why it wasn’t released in the middle of winter to add resonance to its blood-soaked white. Perhaps it’s best seen in the summer, when impressionable would-be vigilantes are less likely to take justice and a snowplow into their own hands.

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In Order of Disappearance
Directed by Hans Petter Moland
Written by Kim Fupz Aakeson
With Stellan Skarsgård, Bruno Ganz, Pål Sverre Hagen
Rated R for bloody violence, and language throughout
116 minutes
Opens today at Landmark E Street Cinema